As mentioned a couple of days ago, aside from the mapping, I've also been pulling together the notes to accompany this set of maps, so for those who might be interested to know more in advance, here are the general comments from the start of that file, as drafted to date.

No one is quite sure who or what the Winter Queen really is. The rare tales mentioning her suggest she may be a deity or an exceptionally powerful, probably immortal, perhaps Faerie, creature. Few such tales give useful details on her nature, though many cultures in the higher northern and southern latitudes of Nibirum preserve variants or fragments of the stories, where the Queen has numerous alternative, typically apotropaic, local titles. It is clear she is thought to possess great magic, much exceptionally obscure knowledge, and a considerable burden. Humanoid in form, she appears as very tall (around 8 or 9 feet high; 2.4 to 2.7 metres), dressed in a long, hooded robe, with piercing blue eyes, bearing a long white staff or crook taller than she is, and an air of great sadness. Her clothing and physical features are said to alter subtly from one day to the next.

She cannot leave the Palace, and has no control over where it goes, as the Palace moves magically, and instantly, once a day to a new location. It is said to be never in exactly the same place twice, but its location is always in an icy, remote, spot, concealed below the surface. Its solitary entrance, while small and hard to find, has no door (there are no doors throughout the Palace), and can be recognised by the profusion of perfect representations of summer flowers and foliage all around it, made of crystal-quality ice. This summer array of perfect specimens is astonishingly beautiful, all of which objects are very fragile. Damaging any is a swift way to raise the Winter Queen's ire, something the tales strongly warn against.

Wherever the Palace alights and for fifty miles around (eighty kilometres), the weather worsens and turns wintry, if it was not winter when it landed. Sometimes, it settles in the clouds, where it stirs them to winter storms, pouring hail and snow down to the surface beneath in icy gales. Even then, the Palace remains deeply hidden by the clouds, for all it still has its ice-flower-surrounded single entrance.

While some tales allude to it, one reality about the Palace is that the souls of all who have died recently in the frozen places of the world, and all those who have died from cold elsewhere, must pass through it on their way from wherever they were to wherever they may be going. A few may linger in the Palace for a time, and some may become temporary guests or servants of the Winter Queen. The Queen has no control over which may stay or move on immediately, however. She frequently converses with those passing through even so, from which much of her secret knowledge derives. Occasional tales may hint disparagingly that the Queen is merely running a ferry service for the recently deceased.

The Palace changes its form whenever it moves, never the same twice, though always in plan-view having the shape of a gigantic snowflake, with walls, floor and ceiling composed entirely of solid, if at least slightly translucent, crystal-like ice. This is always beautiful, with glittering facets like gems that reflect light on or just within the solid ice surfaces. Somehow, light palely manages to illuminate the whole interior with a soft radiance, no matter how deeply buried the Palace may appear to be. At times, rainbow-coloured beams, arcs and spots may be seen, like haloes in the outdoor sky that are created by refraction of sunlight through tiny hexagonal ice-crystals in thin, high-altitude, clouds. Sometimes such light effects may become dazzlingly bright briefly. The ice walls, floors and ceilings reflect light as well, which in places can take on a mirror-quality surface. Such mirrors can allow glimpses of past or future events and places, memories left by the passing spirits, perhaps. The Winter Queen does have some control over such light, vision, visionary and illusory effects within the Palace.

Queen and Palace are so inseparable because in essence, they are parts of the same thing. Many of the Queen's "servants" are actually living ice-constructs which appear from, and can return into, the inner ice surfaces of the Palace as required, thus too are simply another element of this whole being.

Along the way, I let myself get a bit distracted, and decided a CA3 portrait of the Winter Queen might be an interesting addition to the map set, with a hint of the SS2 Bitmap A Snow Frozen Lake fill texture for the border design, which thanks to the standard CA3 bevel effect, looks rather like fine marble now:

She's intended to be between 8 and 9 feet tall in (imaginary) reality, 2.4-2.7 metres.

Which brings us to the last map in this group, covering the eight "ways":

While the seven streets were constructed randomly from the simple system I'd devised and used previously, the railway needed some further adaptations, reducing the angles turns and junctions could have, and such like. In drawing the final maps, I kept the roads deliberately free from as much obstruction as possible (vegetation and the proximity of the properties along each), since the essence of Travelling Places relates to movement. In the accompanying notes, I've suggested GMs should allow speedier normal movement when using any of these routes, as long as the party sticks to the way itself. And naturally, there are oddities. Such as the large, complex building shapes along Candlemaker Row, where sadly, I fear the giant standing candelabra that light this route at night will be barely visible, and likely unidentifiable, at the Forum's resolution on the above maps. So let's try this view instead:

That weird loop in Stave Lane came from the construction process alone, which was a pleasantly amusing surprise when I plotted-out what the dice had rolled for the first time, especially as it made Stave Lane - a name yielding expectations of being straight and direct - one of the most convoluted of Embra's mapped streets!

Heisenberg Terrace, naturally, isn't always there, while the bazaar in Cat Hall is run by a humanoid feline, Shrew Dinger... Go-By Street is easily missed too, without care (aside from being a test for people's knowledge of fantasy literature; a good spot to place The Genuine Magic Shop, perhaps - despite its different author). The literary origins of Everon Road's name might be an easier test though.

As for Runaway Railway, aside from the real-world city of Edinburgh (very loosely the inspiration for some of Embra's place-names, as well as its actual name) being a major railway centre in Scotland, it also has the surviving remnants of a far earlier horse-drawn passenger rail-line, the "Innocent Railway", so I felt I had to include a railway of some sort in Embra. It's obviously short and simple, though as with everything else in Embra, its size can be as deceptive as GMs require. Rather than get bogged-down in detailing the line's operation, I chose to have the rolling stock run by the magical forces of electrickery (see Wyvern Citadel on this, if necessary). Conveniently, the featured text - and remember, these things were chosen randomly! - involved lightning flashes, which made that decision very easy.

With the area map done, and near-central Site 12 selected as the location for the Oracle Temple map created from the dice throws, I thought it might be interesting to try to tie the mapping style up with what the Fantasy Realms one was based on originally, which was that used in the 3rd Edition "Forgotten Realms" D&D published products. I'd hoped to provide an illustration here to show what I mean by this for the dungeon-scale maps, but I've struggled to find anything suitable online, and while I have a couple of PDF books from that era (when I was too deep in my long-standing interest in many other RPG systems than D&D to collect D&D books!), I'm dubious about reusing something from those here on copyright grounds. Plus, a lot of the subterranean maps in this style seem uncomfortably dark and hard to read to me (in the PDFs at least). They do though have a couple of interesting quirks. Walls have a consistently "hand-drawn-wobbly" look, and are highlighted further by use of closely-ruled lower left to upper right hand-drawn hatching strokes, while the scaling grid is a double one, with heavier 10-foot squares subdivided internally into 5-foot ones.

Having randomly opted for just two dice designs for this map, I felt I could probably cope with this for a small area, and set about pulling together a sort-of new style, using elements from both the Fantasy Realms Annual (as the textures in the 3rd Ed dungeon maps have a similar look to the overland maps) and the Old School Dungeon style from Annual 12, the latter mostly for the symbols, though in the end, I only used two of those, and one of them was a repurposed door! The map:

The only further addition was the Alyssa Faden style's compass rose, which is a closer approximation to the 3rd ED one than any others I could find. Most of the map is simply hand-drawn, including all those ruled hatching lines (hey, the Mesa map was mostly hand-drawn too, so I was in practice!).

For a more formal style, the hatching could doubtless be done with a suitable bitmap fill of tile-able ruled lines with transparent gaps between, the polygon tool set up to be drawn fractally, and the colouring of the texture bitmap fill adjusted to fit this reddish-brown theme (which is very characteristic - the original was notably darker than this; I've deliberately aimed for lighter tones). To achieve this colouring here, I've used two different fills, one atop the other, one reddened with an RGB Matrix effect, the other made partly transparent, and then punched holes through both with a Color Key effect to show floors and grid (which latter is on two different sheets to help thicken up the 10-foot squares a little more). There would need to be one more darker blue water fill as well in a fuller style version, as some of the original maps showed up to three deepening water contour levels.

Although the doors in the "real" style were always shown as they are here, elements such as the altar were drawn in a similar brown colour to the background fill, which again I find hard to read (is it a room feature or just a rectangular rock pillar?). However, I was happy with this final result as being close enough to the original to work - to my eye anyway! It's much the same sort-of look to how the Fantasy Realms style is to the published Forgotten Realms overland maps, at least.

Next time, I'm slipping sideways to the left in Nibirum to find somewhere to drop in a little dungeon to somewhere in Serkbergen, Peredur!

The next, fifth, group of Embra's "Places" is the Hilly Places of Interest, linked from the highlighted "Official Guide" map's inner circle segment:

Quite a packed link-map this time, with six individual mapped places to show, as well as the condensed "Streets", even if just four such routeways had to be set-up on one map this time.

Two neat knotwork designs reworked from the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" book provided the focal elements in the map frame design here, once rotated, with a simple linear connecting outline to help highlight them, the curved piece and triangle's slope hinting at upland places at least, although another of the figurative Dover book designs, an eagle, was used on the other "Hilly" maps in this set as a further concession to upstanding terrain.

The cloud symbols Sue mentioned are in the Alyssa Faden Overland style in the 2014 November Annual. Been using it myself recently!

Not sci-fi, since they were all done for the Nibirum Community Atlas, which is all fantasy mapping, but they were done in the general style of planetary-system mapping, so may still be of interest. However, I did a series of maps for said Atlas back in 2018 - Forum thread here, Nibirum Solar System start page here, with a sample map to give you an idea, just for the inner planets:

All these maps are also in my Forum Gallery here.

It's pretty much standard practice in a lot of real-world cross-sectional mapping to vary the line direction like this, often to follow a specific passageway, or series of linked passages and caves. The purpose of the cross-section is to provide useful detail that's not so easy to identify on the plan-view map, so any line that works best to show that is appropriate.

Indeed, if you take a look at the PDF mapping guide for CA7, Caves and Caverns, this is exactly what Ralf (I think?) did in drawing the sample cross-section for that cave using the modern cave mapping style.

Sometimes, it may even be helpful to use more than one such cross-section.

Looking at the cross-section on your first map above here, while it's interesting, in pointing out how variable the levels are in different parts of the cave system, it's not all that helpful, since it implies other parts of the caves may be at similarly variant levels, without indicating what those may be.

In some cases this may be of merely academic interest, where caves aren't directly linked to one another and are some considerable horizontal distance apart, for example. However, where the passages and adjoining caves are at different vertical levels, it can be much more important - i.e. if a passage enters in the ceiling of the next cave, say.

It may also be useful to add some cross-sections of individual passage segments next to the area on the main plan view too. For instance, there are a couple of clear choke-points towards the SE end of the narrow, SE passageway. This suggests they're more or less impassable, yet there's a mapped cave beyond them, so there must be a way through, if perhaps only a crawl-space. A cross-section of just the choke-points on that passage next to the narrowest parts would help clarify that.

Thanks very much everyone!

And on Quenten's point, the odd thing is the Character Artist portraits take hardly any time at all, by contrast to other types of map.

It is a shame that Character Artist doesn't get the same kind of updates and additions other parts of the CC3+ program suite do; some variant body and face shapes would be interesting, for instance, though I appreciate that would add a lot of extra work, fitting the various costumes and weapons, etc., to such alternate forms. Still, if you don't ask...

As mentioned with my previous map in this series (Gruvrå's Mine in Peredur), for the next, I'd be returning closer to my "home" territory in Alarius, as the map chosen to place this one in was the Alarius North Central region:

The base map from the Inkwell Ideas geomorphic dice rolls was another using just two designs from the "Delver" set, so I checked the Inkwell book for these (the "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition"), finding there an interesting group of suggestions of which I ended-up using rather a lot in the final map and accompanying notes. They also influenced where the map could be placed within what is really a vast area of Alarius.

Indeed, several smaller maps have been set within the Alarius North Central region already, so I checked those. As I couldn't find quite what I was looking for among them, I decided to pick a fresh spot suitable for a new area map, on the edge of the large agricultural basin around the Elm River's headwaters (that's the river large and important enough to be shown even on the continental map above). In both the next images, the orange-outlined square of my selected area is 20 miles per side:

This is right on the edge of the "civilised" lands here, around 56° N latitude, and from the appearance of the terrain, a cool temperate spot, but not iced-in year round thanks to being sheltered by the mountains surrounding the fertile riverine plains. Then I devised a hand-drawn graph-paper map for it, with the main terrain types sketched-in, and randomly rolled up some feature options, this time chiefly using just my own random tables. These in turn led to the main watercourse layout, based on where the settlements and other points of interest were. During this process came a realisation that there were quite a few "awakened plant" and "interesting wildlife" features which fitted nicely with the loose druidic theme already generated from the Inkwell Ideas dice book.

And so to the CC3+ mapping. Following my attempts in recent maps of this group to combine more-or-less matching overland and dungeon styles, I thought it would be worth trying-out the Jon Roberts overland and dungeon styles, using the Cartographer's Annual 190 Jon Roberts Revisited overland style for the small area map:

So, welcome to the Petroc Hills! After finding I'd be having giant eagles on this map, I decided the local dialect term would be "petroc" for them, as meaning "small" or "little" roc (= gigantic bird), which also accounts in part for the repeated reuse of "roc" and "rock" in the names (because the pronunciation's the same!). As luck had it, the random locations for some of the settlements on the farmland were close to the map's southern edge, and I decided to site them right on, or extend them slightly over, that border, helping to reinforce that edge-of-civilisation theme. Plus I dislike having maps of this sort which show too marked an "edge of the world" effect. Thus of course, many hills are just peeping onto this map from beyond it too.

I found this style a delight to work with, as the terrain symbol drawings are of such high-quality, they can be greatly enlarged, yet still look superb, and I was especially pleased to find that by rescaling the farmland bitmap fill, the pattern in it would work perfectly for each diamond shape to represent the size of an individual farmstead or family group of smallholdings at this scale, without having to include every farmhouse. When it came to naming the features so-mapped, I found just the hill shapes and forms to be sufficiently inspiring, without having to resort to random tables for their names, and in some cases, their characters. And I did like that pastel grey-green, watercolour-like colouring; very restful 😎 .

However, the style's range beyond the non-terrain symbols is rather restricted, with just a single fashion of settlement types, and some basic trees, so I also used some of the Mike Schley, Herwin Wielink and standard CC3+ overland symbols to indicate others of the special features. Most don't seem all that out of place here, luckily.

For those interested in such things, most of the settlements are predominantly Human in population, although there is a sizable Hill Dwarf community in places (their main settlements are at Appleby, Strawberry Fields and Furzeholm), along with features such as a glassworks in the Strawberry Fields area and apple orchards at (naturally!) Appleby, while most places - even some of the small farmsteads - have their own minor breweries and distilleries, as the whisky from places here is highly prized elsewhere.

Out in the wilds, we have stingbats (that phrasing a minor in-joke for any Shadowdark RPG enthusiasts 😊), which are essentially the blood-sucking, small bat-like creatures called "stirges" in D&D, griffons, cave bears and wild boars, aside from the giant eagles, and also a community of Stone Trolls at the top of Stoneman Vale on the great hill of Stony Heights (also called Griffon Hill). Stone Trolls here highly prize certain kinds of stone, and especially jealously guard the magical Jewel Tree in "their" Vale (it fruits genuine gemstones each autumn).

And right in the middle of the map, at the foot of Rosebud hill, we have Rosebud Caverns, the little underground complex, and cause of all this mapping...